**DoHistory invites you to explore the process of piecing together the lives of ordinary people in the past. It is an experimental, interactive case study based on the research that went into Laura Thatcher Ulrich's book A Midwife's Tale and the film which followed, which were both based upon the remarkable 200 year old diary of midwife/healer Martha Ballard. Although DoHistory is centered on the life of Martha Ballard, you can learn basic skills and techniques for interpreting fragments that survive from any period in history.

The basket is four and a half
inches high and four inches in diameter, about the
size of a large tomato can, though smaller at the
top than the bottom. When new it could have held a
generous pound of meal or beans or twenty-four
fathoms of wampum. Now light leaks through a weft
ravaged by time and insects. The basket holds it
shape through hundreds of invisible mends, the
unseen art of a conservation lab. Tiny twists of
rice paper bonded with unpronounceable adhesives
like polyvinal acetate and polymethyl methacrylate
fill gaps in a fragile fabric strengthened by
multiple infusions of soluble nylon in ethyl
alcohol. Would the basket be as precious without its
story?

It came to the Rhode Island Historical
Society in 1842 with a label carefully written by
the donor:

This little basket, was given by a
squaw, a native of the forest, to Dinah Fenner, wife
of Major Thomas Fenner, who fought in Churche's
Wars; then living in a garrison in Providence, now
Cranston, R.I. The squaw went into the garrison;
Mrs. Fenner gave her some milk to drink, she went
out by the side of a river, peeled the inner bark
from the Wikup tree, sat down under the tree, drew
the shreds out of her blanket, mingled them with the
bark, wrought this little basket, took it to the
garrison and presented it to Mrs. Fenner. Mrs.
Fenner gave it to her daughter, Freelove, wife of
Samuel Westcoat, Mrs. Westcoat gave it to her
granddaughter, Wait Field, wife of William Field at
Field's Point, Mrs. Field gave it to her daughter,
Sarah. Sarah left it to her sister, Elenor, who now
presents it to the Historical Society of Rhode
Island.

The reference to "Churche's
Wars" led nineteenth-century antiquaries to
date the basket to 1676, the year Captain Benjamin
Church of Little Compton, Rhode Island, led New
England troops in victory over the Wampanoag leader
Metacomet, or King Philip. No one since has doubted
the attribution.2 Displayed in the late nineteenth
century alongside other relics of Rhode Island's
first century, the basket quieted a troubling
history of frontier conflict. Exhibited today as an
icon of native art, it fulfills much the same
purpose, shifting attention from the violence of the
late seventeenth century to our own generation's
hopes for multiculturalism.

The details in
Field's description line up like clues in a mystery:
a garrison, milk, a Wikup tree, shreds from a
blanket, and those evocative names-Dinah, Freelove,
Wait. There was a Dinah Fenner who lived in Rhode
Island in 1676, though in that year her name was
Dinah Borden, and she was only eleven years old. She
did eventually marry Thomas Fenner, a man who helped
to defend Providence in King Philip's War, and they
did have a daughter named Freelove who had a
granddaughter named Wait. Yet there is much in the
story that remains puzzling. If the basket was made
by "a native of the forest," why would she
have come to an enemy garrison in time of war
seeking milk, a food repulsive to a people known
today to be lactose intolerant? Was she a refugee?
So desperately hungry she was willing to accept any
food offered? If so, how does one explain the
basket? The exposed warp is indeed rough, but the
twined pattern is intricate and artful. Could its
maker have stripped and soaked fibers from the inner
bark of a tree, gathered husks from an abandoned
field, then patiently sat on the bank of a river
weaving in a time and place where even friendly
Indians were in danger? That hardly seems likely,
yet laboratory analysis tells us there are fragments
of red and blue wool still clinging to the interior
of the basket. Could they have come from an English
blanket?

The twentieth-century Narragansett
historian and basket-maker Ella Sekatau once told a
visiting scholar about a curious window in an old
schoolhouse near her Rhode Island home. One pane was
of "old, old glass," ridged and warped.
Looking into it, people saw things that weren't
there, like "a sea with Indian people, and it
didn't match with the window next to it" or
ancient figures standing by a big stone outcropping.
Everybody saw different things, not the actual
objects that sat on the other side of the window,
but shadowy scenes from somewhere else. "My
cousin's husband said you shouldn't have things like
that, and he broke it."

Dinah Fenner's
basket is that kind of window. Some will use it to
imagine a history more intimate and peaceful than
the one in books. Others will find nothing in it
they can trust. Interpreting such an object requires
both imagination and skepticism, imagination to see
new possibilities in an old story, but skepticism
about its placid surface. Here the important
question is not how a Rhode Island woman got her
basket, but why milk, a basket, and a blanket should
appear in the same narrative. Rereading the early
history of New England with these objects in mind
transforms an apocryphal story into a powerful lens
for understanding exchange relations in the first
century of English settlement. To write about
blankets is to write about the expansion of English
commerce. To write about baskets is to discover the
little-known work of Native American women. To
search for the meaning of milk is to find the
biblical vision that animated the English quest for
land. The history of Dinah Fenner's family brings
these themes together in unexpected and disturbing
ways, providing a solution to the origins of the
basket that is less literal than Field's telling yet
true to its larger themes.

The English who
came to the coast of what is now New England in the
early 1600s were not all alike. Some came to fish,
some to pray, and among those who prayed there were
enough differences to keep them squabbling and
sometimes hounding one another from colony to colony
for generations. The people they found here also
differed. Although scholars sometimes refer to them
collectively as Algonkians, they spoke different
dialects, inhabited different river basins, and
assigned a bewildering array of names to one
another. In terms of textile history, however,
Englishmen and Algonkians differed more from each
other than they did among themselves. The English
came from a wool-producing country proud of its
blankets. Algonkians were renowned for their
basketry.

Archaeological sites on coastal New
England are littered with lead seals once attached
to bolts of fabric. As the Englishman Richard
Hakluyt espressed it in a 1584 treatise, the second
purpose of colonization, after advancing the
"kingedome of Christe," was the vending
"of the masse

of our cloths and other
commodities." The English did that with a
vengeance.Yet the first Englishmen to visit North
America were fascinated with the unfamiliar fabrics
they found in Indian villages. Among the Algonkians,
textile production was women's work. Men worked in
stone, metal, and wood, producing impressive tobacco
pipes, knot dishes, pendants, and other ornaments.
Women made netted, twined, sewn, and plaited
textiles to cover their houses, dry corn, trap fish,
store provisions, carry produce, and line graves. In
the words of one English observer, they made baskets
of "rushes, some of bents; others of maize
husks; others, of a kind of silk grass; others of a
kind of wild hemp; and some of barks of trees, many
of them, very neat and artificial, with the
portraitures of birds, beasts, fishes, and flowers,
upon them in colours." Men hunted and cared for
tobacco fields. Women planted, hoed, and harvested
food crops, storing them in containers of their own
manufacture. Rhode Island's Roger Williams described
heaps of maize "of twelve, fifteene, or twentie
bushells a heap" drying on woven mats by day,
covered with tarps of basketry at night.

One
writer claimed to have seen an immense basket buried
in the earth that held sixty gallons of maize.
Another said Indian containers ranged in volume from
"a quart to a quarter" (in archaic usage a
quarter was eight bushels).Tightly woven bags of
soft hemp held the parched maize called nokake in
some dialects and yohicake, yoheag, yokeg, or
nokehick in others, a food "so sweet,
toothsome, and hearty, that an Indian will travel
many days with no other food but this meal, which he
eateth as he needs, and after it drinketh
water." Williams claimed to have traveled with
an Indian band "neere 100 miles through the
woods, every man carrying a little Basket of this at
his back, and sometimes in a hollow Leather Girdle
about his middle."

Although Europeans
had their own basketry traditions, basketry was far
more varied among the Algonkians. Thomas Morton
wrote of mats made by stitching together long strips
of what the English called "sedge" with
"needles made of the splinter bones of a Cranes
legge, with threeds, made of their Indian
hempe." In preparation for netting or weaving,
women spun fine fibers between their fingers or
across their thighs. William Wood said that Indian
cordage was "so even, soft, and smooth that it
looks more like silk than hemp." Other writers
admired the "curious Coats" or mantles of
turkey feathers that women wove together "with
twine of their owne makinge, very prittily."
John Josselyn, who spent much of his time in
northern New England, described "Delicate sweet
dishes . . . of Birch-Bark sowed with threads drawn
from Spruce and white Cedar-Roots, and garnished on
the outside with flourisht works, and on the brims
with glistering quills taken from the Porcupine, and
dyed, some black, others red."

Wigwams
were also a form of basketry. Wood said that women
framed them like an English garden arbor, "very
strong and handsome," then covered them
"with close-wrought mats of their own weaving
which deny entrance to any drop of rain, though it
come both fierce and long, neither can the piercing
north wind find a cranny." Observing Indians
along the Maine coast a little later in the century,
Josselyn described similar structures "covered
with the bark of Trees" and lined inside
"with mats made of Rushes painted with several
colours." Two different marsh plants-cattail
(Typha) and bulrush (Scirpus)-yielded different
fabrics. Sewn in overlapping layers, the leaves of
the cat-o'-nine-tails swelled and exuded a gummy
substance when wet, giving exterior mats their
waterproof quality. Rushes, on the other hand, dried
quickly and when combined with other fibers, such as
the soft inner bast of cedar, could be woven into
soft and absorbent mats as decorative as they were
practical. These mats gave Indian dwellings their
portability. "I have seen half a hundred of
their Wigwams together in a piece of ground and they
shew prettily, within a day or two, or a week they
have been all dispersed," Josselyn wrote.12
Wigwams moved because work moved. Coastal groups
cultivated fields of maize, beans, squash, and
tobacco in summer, mov-ing to warm interior valleys
in winter where game and fuel were more
plentiful.

The most exotic textiles required
both male and female labor. Men drilled and ground
the beads called wampum from periwinkle, conch, and
whelk shells or from the blue-black centers of the
quahog. For ordinary exchange, these were strung
into lengths the English measured in fathoms, but
for ritual regalia, women wove the beads into
"pleasant wild works" with warps of sinew
and wefts of hemp. A wampum band worn by the
Wampanoag leader Metacomet was nine inches wide and
long enough to reach from a man's shoulders to his
ankles. It was edged with red hair said to have been
acquired in the Mohawk country. Metacomet's
accoutrements, according to Josselyn, were worth
twenty pounds in English money, or five times as
much as all the clothing and bedding he recommended
an English immigrant bring to New
England.

Although English writers admired
Algonkian textiles, they had difficulty explaining
their decorative qualities. The best analogy they
could find was to the needlework of upper-class
women, but since Indian women also did field work,
this only confused the issue. The most elaborate
exploration of the problem is in a Latin poem with
English translation published by William Morrell,
who spent a year at Plymouth in 1623. Morrell
compared decorative mats to the pictorial tapestries
or "arras" found in English country houses
and the "curious finger-worke" he found in
Indian villages to passementerie or parchment lace.
Yet he puzzled over the fact that Algonkian women
combined this delicate work with physical labor.
"These hands doe digge the earth, and in it lay
/ Their fair choyce corne, and take the weeds
away." Native women confounded English notions
of class by combining outdoor labor with fine finger
work and English notions of gender by performing
agricultural labor the English assigned to men.
While women worked, men, Morrell believed, spent
their days "in play, / In hunting, armes, and
pleasures."

The division of labor among
Native Americans was probably more complex than the
simple male-female divide described in English
accounts. Surely there was some heirarchy of age,
skill, or status in textile production, and the
sexual division of labor was not as fixed as it
might seem. Williams said that men cut and set the
long poles for houses, and that even in agricultural
work, "sometimes the man himselfe, (either out
of love to his Wife, or care for his Children, or
being an old man) will help the Woman which (by the
custome of the Countrey) they are not bound
to." Williams no doubt idealized the
noncompetitive virtues he wished to inculcate among
his own people when he wrote of "friendly
joyning" to break up fields, build forts, hunt,
or fish, but his description of work parties of
forty, fifty, or a hundred men and women corrects
others' accounts of female drudgery and male
leisure. His observations reinforce the larger
point, however, that female as well as male labor
was visible to and admired by
outsiders.

Nothing survives that can fully
convey the complexity of seventeenth-century
Algonkian textiles, but Dinah Fenner's basket read
alongside archaeological fragments helps us to
understand some of the techniques and materials
used. The warp is of bark, the wefts of wool and of
a flatter material that may have been cornhusk. The
construction is complex. The weaver began with a
plaited base, using three strands of bark for each
warp, then moved to simple twining and finally to a
technique called "wrapped twining" in
which two wefts, one active and one passive,
intersect the warp. By changing the color as she
wrapped, she produced the pattern. The technical
details are important because they locate the basket
in an ancient textile tradition. Shreds of twining
very similar to that in Dinah's basket have been
found in northern Vermont in archaeological sites
dating from the Early Woodland period (1000-100
b.c.). One fragment even revealed a faint chevron
created by weaving animal hair in two colors. Except
for the wool in its weft, Dinah's basket could have
been made a thousand years before the first European
excursion to North America. It only hints at the
variety of early textiles. Through electron
microscopy, archaeologists have identified early
baskets woven from the "bast" or stem
fibers of wild hemp, dogbane, milkweed, and nettles,
as well as the fibrous inner bark of slippery elm,
black willow, cedar, and basswood. Excavations from
later sites include plaited and sewn matting, coiled
netting, and twined textiles of many
kinds.

Other bags and baskets thought to have
been made in the early colonial period suggest the
range of techniques and designs. On July 4, 1842,
the same year that Eleanor Field presented her
great-great-grandmother's basket to the Rhode Island
Historical Society, a Norwich, Connecticut, man
donated a twined bag to the Connecticut Historical
Society in Hartford. It, too, came with a story. He
said he had received it "from Cynthia, now 60
or 70, and daughter of Lucy Tocamwap, the first
member of the Mohegan church. By tradition of her
own family Cynthia believes the basket to be near
300 years old." He called it a Yohicake bag. If
so, it was an extraordinarily large one. Measuring
13 1/4 by 9 1/4 inches, it could have held as much
as three quarts of meal. The upper edge originally
had twenty-four eyelets through which a drawstring
could have been threaded. Unlike Dinah Fenner's
basket, the Mohegan bag is a soft textile, flat when
empty. In each row, the weaver twisted two weft
threads around each warp in a kind of spiral, then
inserted porcupine quills in two shades to create
the design. The banded design, though similar to
painted motifs on later Mohegan baskets, is quite
different from the stepped diagonals on Dinah's
basket.

A third bag or basket with a New
England provenance is closer in size to the Yohicake
bag but closer stylistically to Dinah's. Called a
wampum bag by its present owners, it ostensibly
belonged to a Haverhill, Massachusetts, woman who
was taken captive in the late seventeenth century. A
later owner edged it with chintz and turned it into
a sewing basket. This basket, like Dinah's, has
strong diagonal elements with serrated edges and
negative stripes. A fourth example came to a
Massachusetts museum in 1989. Although it has no
history, textile experts believe it, too, is
colonial. Like Dinah's basket, it mixes wool with
bark. The handling of the materials is different,
however. The warps are "plied" or doubled
and the wool worked in later, as with the porcupine
quills on the Yohicake bag. The variations in the
four baskets may reflect individual preferences,
change over time, or stylistic differences among
neighboring Algonkian peoples. The twining
techniques, however, link all four to ancient
American textiles.

Archaeological evidence
documents the similarities and differences between
European and indigenous fabrics. At a Wampanoag site
on the west side of Narragansett Bay, archaeologists
found sixty-six fragments of native basketry
alongside seventy-three relics of European cloth.
The European fabrics ranged from bits of a white
wool blanket with end stripes of red, blue-green,
and brown to a long coil of a trimming called
"galloon" woven in yellow silk with twists
of silver thread. The Algonkian textiles included
ordinary matting as well as fabrics too complex and
individual for an English loom-a belt of glass beads
woven with sinew, a wampum collar skillfully shaped
to fit the curve of a neck, and fragments of matting
that incorporated as many as three techniques in a
single swatch.

Though made from different
fibers and for different uses by people in radically
different circumstances, many employed identical
weave structures. A mat of undyed vegetable fibers,
for instance, and a fabric of brown wool both
exemplify "plain weave," the simple
over-under technique that most of us learned in
childhood. Another fragment woven in what textile
specialists would call a "2/2 twill" is
identical structurally to the pieces of English
blanket found on the same site. Other samples
demonstrate that Algonkian as well as English
weavers knew how to vary plain-woven fabrics by
combining warps and wefts of different materials or
weights.

What was different about the two
sets of textiles was not their structural
sophistication or the abilities of their makers, but
their mode of production. In the Middle Ages,
Europeans had perfected a method of producing large
quantities of fairly simple fabrics through the use
of spinning wheels and looms. Equally important were
changes made in the early modern era in the division
of labor. English fabrics traded in North America
were made in an economy that divided work into many
parts. A hierarchy of workers performed a small set
of tasks over and over again, middlemen in one part
of the kingdom selling wool, spun yarn, or undyed
cloth to intermediaries in other towns who passed
them along a production chain that stretched from
one end of the British Isles to another and across
the Atlantic to America.

For Europeans, flax
was the most important vegetable fiber. Depending on
soil and weather, it produced a long silky
"line" used in linen or a shorter, rougher
fiber called "tow." Sheep provided both
"wool" and "worsted," a
difference created not only by alternative ways of
feeding the animals, but from different methods of
preparing fleeces for spinning. Carding oriented the
fibers of short, crimpy wool horizontally, so that
when spun they formed a fuzzy surface or nap on the
finished cloth. Fulling or pounding accentuated the
effect, creating a dense surface that could be
sheared. Long hairy worsteds, on the other hand,
were combed longitudinally to create smooth fabrics
that could be glazed or pressed. Woolens were the
basis of the heavy cloths historians call the
"Old Draperies." By the early seventeenth
century, lighter fabrics made of worsted, alone or
in combination with linen, wool, or silk, became
important. These were sometimes called
"Tammies," from the French word
estame.

A broadside celebrating a
parliamentary bill protecting worsted shows one
artist's perception of the organization of English
manufacturing. In the center, an unbroken circle of
male weavers joins hands around the bonfire as giddy
women, portrayed here as consumers rather than as
workers, throw foreign imports into the fire.
Smaller images around the border symbolize the many
groups, from spinsters to landlords and from wool
combers to alehouse keepers, sustained by worsted
manufacturing. What is remarkable about this image
is its emphasis on the compartmentalization of
production. Combing, spinning, dyeing, and dressing
are as separate from one another as plowing and
sailing.

What was true of worsteds was true
of wool as well. In a famous description of the
blanket makers of Witney in Oxfordshire, Robert Plot
explained how wagons went weekly from Witney to
London, returning with "fells" wool taken
from animals slaughtered in "the furthermost
parts of the Kingdom" and gathered into London
for marketing. Witney manufacturers sorted the wool
from these fleeces into half a dozen grades,
shipping long stapled worsted to stocking
manufacturers, reserving the best
"Bay-wool" and "Head-wool" to
make their most expensive blankets, and designating
"Middle" and "Ordinary" wool for
medium-priced products, some of which they mixed
with local fleeces for the cloth they called
"duffels." They used "tail-wool"
for seamen's blankets and worked what was left into
a rough fabric called "Wednel" used to
stiffen collars, wrap bales, or cover barges. Plot
estimated that Witney's blanketers kept 150 looms in
active service, employing "3000 poor People,
from Children of eight Years old, to decrepit old
Age." Sorting, warping, weaving, fulling,
dyeing, and finishing were men's work. The children
and old folks did the carding and
spinning.

This was the division of labor Adam
Smith theorized nearly a century later in The Wealth
of Nations when he described a plain woolen coat
worn by a day laborer. "The shepherd, the
sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the
dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the
fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join
their different arts in order to complete even this
homely production." Subdividing work increased
productivity by reducing "every man's business
to some one simple operation," by saving
"the time commonly lost in passing from one
sort of work to another," and by allowing the
"application of proper machinery." By the
time he wrote, both the subdivision of labor and the
application of machinery had advanced considerably,
but the general direction of change had been
established much earlier. Seventeenth-century
writers would have understood Smith's contrast
between civilized and uncivilized economies. In
"savage nations" everyone worked but
everyone was at the same time "miserably
poor." In "advanced and thriving
nations," some people worked hardly at all and
consumed ten times more than others, yet every one
was enriched. "It is the great multiplication
of the productions of all the different arts, in
consequence of the division of labour, which
occasions, in a well-governed society, that
universal opulence which extends itself to the
lowest ranks of the people." Hence, an
industrious peasant in an advanced society was more
wealthy than an "African king" who was the
absolute master of "ten thousand naked
savages."

American Indians were among
the earliest models for the European notion of the
"naked savage." An icon of a man dressed
only in leaves was impressed in wax on the earliest
official documents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Although the details of clothing and even the sex of
the Indian on the colony's seal changed over time,
most versions included the plaintive cry "Come
over and help us," an adaptation of a passage
in the Book of Acts describing the apostle Paul's
vision of a man praying, "Come over into
Macedonia, and help us." In the English view,
New World "savages" needed both spiritual
and material clothing. Christianity and good English
cloth came together.

Yet writers who
emphasized Indian nakedness sometimes described
Indian clothing in some detail. Williams's Key into
the Language of North America included Algonkian
words for coat, mantle, waistcoat, apron, stockings,
and shoes. He admired, and perhaps even tried,
native footwear, which "being excellently
tann'd by them, is excellent for to travell in wet
and snow; for it is so well tempered with oyle, that
the water cleane wrings out; and being hang'd up in
their chimney, they presently driee without hurt as
myself have often proved." He differentiated
the aprons or breechcloths that adults of both sexes
wore and the loose wrappings that they picked up and
put down as required. William Wood referred to
women's wrappings as "beaver petticoats."
When Daniel Gookin wrote that the "Indians'
clothing in former times was of the same matter as
Adam's was," he wasn't referring to the
nakedness of the first couple or to the aprons of
fig leaves they constructed for themselves but to
the "coats of skins" God gave them when he
banished them from the Garden of Eden.

The
English wanted these coats. The makers of high-style
hats eagerly sought American beaver since it was the
only fiber that when felted was both strong and
supple enough to sustain its shape when wet. Thomas
Morton reported that in the 1630s beaver sold for
ten shillings a pound. Presumably that was the price
given to the English broker, not the Algonkian
supplier, but at ten shillings, a single pound of
beaver would have purchased two and a half pounds of
broadcloth, the most expensive of the English
fabrics. Algonkians gave up Adam's clothing not
because it was inferior to English cloth but because
it had become too valuable to wear. The half-naked
Indian on the Massachusetts seal obscures the
interconnectedness of Adam's and Adam Smith's
clothing.

Indians did not exchange their
beaver mantles for broadcloth but for duffels, or
"trucking cloth," a kind of blanketing
woven about sixty inches wide and dyed in deep
colors. Plot said the Witney manufactories dyed most
pieces "Red or Blue, which are the Colours that
best please the Indians of Virginia and New
England." He believed the Indians tore duffels
into "Gowns of about two Yards long, thrusting
their Arms through two Holes made for that Purpose,
and so wrapping the rest about them as we our Loose
coats." No other seventeenth-century source
mentions the armholes, though New England writers
agreed about the length. The earliest writers used
the terms duffels and blankets interchangeably. By
midcentury, the common term for a two-yard length of
trucking cloth was "Indian Coat." William
Wood described customers at English trading posts
choosing "a good coarse blanket, through which
they cannot see, interposing it between the sun and
them" to make sure it was of the proper weight
and thickness. This they used for "a double
end, making it a coat by day and a covering by
night."

His description displayed both
arrogance and grudging admiration: "They love
not to be imprisoned in our English fashion. They
love their own dog fashion better (of shaking their
ears and being ready in a moment)." Like other
seventeenth-century writers wood saw the Indian
preference for loose wrappings from a stance of
cultural superiority: Indians wore blankets because
they were animal-like and because they didn't know
better. Some twentieth-century scholars have been
almost as ethnocentric, arguing that because
"Indians had no woven cloth before the arrival
of European traders and settlers," it took time
for their women "to learn sewing skills."
Others assume that Indians were attracted to woven
fabrics because they "were lighter and more
colorful than animal skins and nearly as warm,"
as though the replacement of one form of clothing
for another were a simple matter of consumer
choice.

What these explanations miss are the
asymmetries between European and Algonkian textiles.
Indians didn't adopt English blankets because they
were superior to their traditional clothing but
because furs and hides purchased new products like
iron pots, knives, and guns. It is hardly surprising
that the wearers chose to use their new clothing
very much as they had the old. Nor did Indian women
have any reason to take up English textile tasks
when they were so fully occupied with their own. A
trucking-cloth blanket might replace a mantle of
skins, but it could not roof or furnish a wigwam.
Trade with Europeans had a profound impact on male
hunting and on the trading and manufacture of wampum
which became a kind of currency in the fur trade,
but it had little effect on women's other textile
work. A hundred years after contact, Algonkian women
were still weaving mats for wigwams and baskets to
store and carry food.

Unlike wampum, baskets
had only a minor role in English-Algonkian exchange.
In a letter forwarding "30 fathom of
Beades" to Governor John Winthrop of
Massachusetts, Roger Williams offhandedly mentioned
that he had sent a basket, "a present from
Miantunnomues wife to your deare Companion Mrs
Winthrop." To the Narragansett sachem and his
wife Wawaloam the basket may have had as much
diplomatic meaning as the beads, but to Williams it
seemed a mere gratuity. Wood also described
exchanges between Indian and English women as
"gifts." "These women resort often to
the English houses," he wrote, adding that they
usually brought with them "something that is
either rare or desired, as strawberries,
hurtleberries, raspberries, gooseberries, cherries,
plums, fish, and other such gifts." Mats and
baskets must have entered into these exchanges,
though evidence of their presence survives only by
accident. A Springfield court record, for example,
mentions "a double Indian mat compassing the
bed." A Salisbury, Massachusetts, witch trial
told of "a little Indian basket" that
wouldn't stay in the loft where it was kept. (That
an ordinary English brick had the same propensity
shows that Indian goods had no monopoly on
enchantment.)

Baskets are hard to find in
early records because they resisted commodification.
As manufactured products they were less valuable to
the English than furs and skins, nor were the
materials of which they were made of particular
interest to colonists. Where Indian women found
abundant fibers for weaving, the English saw only
dark forests, waste fields, and dismal swamps. But
baskets were there, and they, like blankets, were
essential props in the unfolding events that led to
misunderstanding and war.

So far we have
spoken of the native peoples of the Northeast
collectively, but in fact there was no single
"Algonkian" response to English
colonization, no unified "Indian" point of
view. The Wampanoags under their leader Massasoit
welcomed early settlers at Plymouth in 1620 in part
because they saw them as potential allies against
their traditional enemies, the Narragansets. In
Connecticut the Mohegans eventually joined a Puritan
alliance against their feared neighbors the Pequots.
Epidemics introduced by transient fishermen and
voyagers had weakened coastal Indians even before
the arrival of English settlers. Pious New
Englanders saw God's hand in their destruction. When
smallpox struck southern New England in 1633,
William Bradford thought that lack of proper bedding
may have contributed to the suffering. "They
die," he wrote, "like rotten sheep."
Running sores stuck to the mats they lay on.
"When they turn them, a whole side will flay
off at once as it were, and they will be all of a
gore blood, most fearful to behold."

Excerpted from The Age of Homespun by
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Copyright 2001 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Excerpted by
permission of Knopf,
a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.